It’s all gotten out of hand. They’ve got concepts playing games now. Specifically, the venerable genre of Twitch Plays—those times when a swarming Twitch chat competes for control over games like Pokémon, and Dark Souls—has evolved to the point that Pi is currently playing Pokémon Sapphire. Actually, it’s been playing it for three years (via GamesRadar).
That’s Pi as in the mathematical constant. The one you probably know as (at least) 3.14 but which goes on, well, forever if you let it. The way it works is this: Every digit between 0 and 9 has been assigned to a button on the Game Boy Advance (some buttons have two digits assigned). The computer then simply proceeds through digits of Pi sequentially and makes the corresponding input. For example: The first three digits—3.14—would correspond to a push of B, then A, then the left D-Pad.
At time of writing, the game had just passed its 86,452,000th digit of Pi. That’s over 25,000 hours of game time since the experiment began on October 16, 2021.
Want to guess where all that effort has gotten it? If you chose ‘not even out of the starting town’ then my friend, you’re half-right. Pi—or Seth, as its character in the game is called—has made it out of Littleroot Town a few times. Alas, the fickle finger of maths seems to have since led Pi crawling all the way back to Littleroot, losing all that progress it had made in the course of several thousand hours.
Still, it has accomplished some things. It even recently managed to absolutely curbstomp rival trainer May after finally reaching its first battle with her last, uh, May. The reason? All that meandering has power levelled Pi’s starting Treecko to a level 88 Sceptile. May’s Torchic got turned to thin paste once the right digits got put in for Sceptile to actually make an attack.
In fact, per the channel’s chatbot, the farthest Pi has made it is to Petalburg forest, where it annihilated Bug Catcher Lyle’s sextet of level 3 Wurmples.
I’m pretty sure it has to beat the game some day, though, although whether or not that’s before the last star in the universe goes out is an open question. Theoretically, you can find every possible sequence of numbers in Pi, including several (well, infinite, I think) that would take our hardy hero all the way through the Elite Four. We just have to find them, and maybe get out of Littleroot Town once and for all.